INTRODUCTION TO

THE 2014 EDITION

HARLIE and I have been friends for a long time. He insists on

creeping into books that are not supposed to be about him and

making them about him anyway.

He has gone to space in The Dingilliad series (Jumping

Off The Planet, Bouncing Off The Moon, and Leaping To The

Stars). He’s fought more-than-human super-warriors as the brain

of the LS-1187 starship in the Star Wolf series (Voyage Of The

Star Wolf, The Middle Of Nowhere, and Blood And Fire). And he’s

even popped up as a chapter in my book on writing (Worlds Of

Wonder). And I suspect he’s peeking out from behind the scenery

in at least half a dozen other projects.

In every case, he’s been a damned pain in the ass—

because he keeps asking uncomfortable questions. HARLIE loves

to create moral and ethical dilemmas.

A friend once described HARLIE as the other half of

my brain. He postulated that I split myself into two minds so I can

have someone ferocious to argue with. He might be right. When

arguing with HARLIE, I sometimes feel that I’m talking things

over with a superior intellect, and that startles me, because I’m

certain I’m nowhere near as smart as HARLIE pretends.

Nevertheless, it’s a flattering observation.

Myself, I see HARLIE as that annoying little voice that

keeps asking, “Why?”

A little history here.

HARLIE is a child of the sixties.

I’m not going to try and explain that decade. It’s

enough to say that the sixties were a grand demonstration of chaos

theory on a global scale. The baby boomers came of age with a

culture-shattering impact. Everything got reinvented—

automobiles, music, comic books, movies, television, hair and

clothing styles, our ways of thinking about ourselves and our

future.

It was a difficult and marvelous time. A whole

generation was crashing headlong into what then passed for

adulthood. We were asking “What’s it all about?” and “Where’s it

happening?” and totally missing the point that it was up to us to

create it ourselves.

It was a time of enormous experimentation with form,

content, and even the creative process itself.

In the science fiction community, some writers were

arguing that the use of recreational drugs enhanced their creativity.

Others disagreed, arguing that tampering with your brain chemistry

was probably not a good idea.

Myself, I was something of an agnostic on the issue.

(Yes, I did try marijuana in college, but I didn’t exhale.) But it

didn’t take me long to discover that the use of marijuana was

slowing down my typing speed from 120 words per minute to no

words at all.

I’ll concede that a person can get some interesting

visions and insights from marijuana, and even the occasional

useful hallucination, but you can also have some very stupid and

ugly experiences as well. Even more important, the physical and

mental effects of drugs tend to destroy personal discipline.

At this remove, decades later, I’m clear that drug use is

a self-centered activity. It’s about what’s happening in your own

head, not what’s happening in the physical universe. It doesn’t

make a difference in the real world. It doesn’t contribute anything

to anybody else. If anything, it degrades a person’s ability to make

a difference.

But I didn’t know it that way then and I couldn’t say it

as clearly as I can now. What I did know, if only on a gut level,

was that there was something wrong with the arguments for drug

use—and if I couldn’t ask the right question, then maybe HARLIE

could.

So, the first HARLIE story wasn’t really about

HARLIE. It was about asking a question that turned out to be

much more profound than I realized when I typed it. “What’s your

purpose?”

Looking back on it now, that first HARLIE story

(“Oracle For A White Rabbit”) was a little heavy handed, but

whatever else we were doing in the sixties, subtlety was never a

part of it. I make no apologies.

Of course, once the question was asked—“What does it

mean to be human?”—it demanded an attempt at an answer. The

question rattled around in my head for a while, like a ball bearing

in a metal bucket. I knew it was a great question. I also knew I was

not going to attempt to answer it. I’m not a philosopher and I’m

not arrogant enough to pretend to be one. I figured I would just

tiptoe away from the subject and go back to writing about nice safe

things like . . . like, um, starships and robots and alien worlds.

Things I didn’t have to think too hard about.

Right.

The universe is a bear trap. The universe is a practical

joker. The universe is a pie aimed at your face. The universe

doesn’t care what you think or what you’ve planned. The universe

does what it does. And if the universe occasionally pushes you off

a cliff, don’t take it personally. It’s just the universe doing what it’s

designed to do.

So when you find yourself at the bottom of the chasm,

squashed and flattened like an accordion-shaped coyote, waddling

around with a “what just happened?” expression, that’s just another

part of life. The technical term is “reality check.”

See, here’s the thing.

The traditional view is that great writing is the product

of great suffering. (Or great madness. Take your pick.)

Unfortunately, I didn’t have any great suffering or great

madness. My circumstances were so ordinary I was doomed.

I did not grow up poor or abused or the product of a

broken home. My father was not a suave international diamond-

smuggler and espionage agent; my mother had not sold her body to

escape the concentration camps. My grandmother did not know

any arcane mysteries having to do with wolfsbane or dragon’s

blood, and we did not have a dead twin walled up in the basement

nor an eccentric aunt living reclusively in the attic that we didn’t

talk about. We didn’t even have a basement, and the attic was

filled with insulation. Nobody in the family was having illicit

affairs, illegitimate children, mental breakdowns, or problems with

alcohol or gambling or drugs.

It was embarrassing. We had no dark secrets at all. Not

even the commonplace ones. Not even the smallest bit of mordant

family dysfunction to inspire a Tennessee Williams kind of

fascination with despair. I did not have a mysterious birthmark that

identified me as the lost heir to the throne of Orstonia. Nor did we

have visitations from poltergeists, space aliens, or arcane elder

gods. I didn’t even run away to join the circus at thirteen.

No. None of that.

Instead, I grew up in a fairly average suburb of Los

Angeles, went to a series of fairly average schools, had fairly

average teachers, and earned mostly average grades (not because I

was average, I was just uninterested; science fiction was a lot more

interesting.) Nothing out of the ordinary happened. Ward and June

Cleaver would have been bored. My childhood was so white bread,

you could have spread mayonnaise on it and made sandwiches. All

right—Jewish rye bread, no mayonnaise. But you get the point.

I do admit to having had an obsessive-compulsive

passion for monster movies and science fiction, but that was

normal for teenage boys before video games were invented. The

biggest argument I ever had with my parents was about my buying

a motorcycle to get to school. I bought it. End of argument. Big

deal.

The lesson—the cliché—told to would-be writers that

you should “write what you know” is a very hollow instruction. At

that age, who really knows anything? I’m sure I didn’t. My

experience with the real world was limited to what I read in books

and what I saw at the movies. It was other people’s stories. It

wasn’t just secondhand reality. It was other people’s conversations

about reality.

By the time I finished high school and stumbled

through the first few years of college, I had learned just how little

talent I had as an artist or an actor or even as a storyteller. My

social skills weren’t all that terrific either. There wasn’t a lot of

evidence to demonstrate that I had any real aptitude at anything,

something that more than one instructor felt compelled to point out

publicly.

I did have two things going for me. I had a control

freak’s ferocious determination to find out how things work, and I

had just enough skill at stringing words together to make an

occasionally readable sentence. But I had nothing to say.

I had nothing to say about life because I hadn’t lived it.

Which brings me back to that horrendous clash of

symbols we called the sixties. If the fifties were about innocence,

then the sixties were about losing it. Big time.

It was a decade that started in promise and stumbled

into disaster. The civil rights struggle boiled over into church

bombings and violence and murders; President Kennedy was

murdered in Dallas; the flower children turned into dropped-out

hippies; drug use became hip; Vietnam escalated into a full-blown

war; riots broke out in the urban ghettos; draft riots broke out on

the college campuses; the peace movement turned violent; LBJ

developed a credibility gap; Malcolm X and Martin Luther King

and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated; Woodstock turned into

Altamont; and, as if to seal the deal, a night of horrific murders

terrified Los Angeles. There was no escape from the avalanche of

time.

Not even the awe-inspiring sight of Neil Armstrong and

Buzz Aldrin broadcasting live from the moon could redeem the

decade. As the decade collapsed into history, it seemed as if most

of us were so scarred and traumatized by what we’d been through

that we just wanted to retreat into a nice safe cocoon.

We had started the decade with a clear sense of who we

were. By the end of those years, we had lost our sense of self and it

hurt so much we couldn’t stand it.

So if the sixties was about anything—and it was about a

lot of things—it was also about the search for self. At least, that’s

how I experienced it. Who am I, anyway? What am I up to? Where

do I go from here? And why? (Yes, I was right on schedule.)

I won’t go into the details of my own personal soap

opera, I’ll save that for another time, but it was pretty ghastly. If I

had still been spiritual, I would have seen it as evidence that God is

a malignant thug.

By the end of that last year, I felt so beaten up and so

beaten down, so alone in the moment, so abandoned and confused

about everything, that I felt I had lost purpose. I felt I had nothing

left. I wasn’t all that nice a person to be around. Ask those who

were there.

What I did have was an empty little apartment, a desk, a

typewriter, a ream of paper, and yes . . . finally, something to write

about: the question that HARLIE had so casually asked before my

life blew up in my face.

What does it mean to be human?

So I sat and I typed. I had long conversations myself—

with HARLIE. We looked at the big question and all the little

questions that attached to it like barnacles. We held all the

questions up to the light and took them apart, piece by piece. I sat.

I typed. I hammered away, one sentence at a time.

Every time I stopped to read what I wrote, I realized

there was more to say. More sitting, more typing. Pages passed

through the typewriter five times, ten times, sometimes more. All

that editing, all that rewriting—it was like having multiple

conversations with myself, a changing self, one that was being

revised by the processes of time and story.

Sitting and chatting with HARLIE was my own

personal turnaround. No, please don’t call it therapy. It wasn’t.

Those chats were about creating a more informed conversation

about life, that’s all. They grew into four expository stories,

enough to become a complete novel. In the process, I also learned

to examine every sentence carefully to make sure it actually

communicated a clear thought and didn’t just use up words. I

started learning to pay attention to what I was really saying.

I’m not so arrogant as to assume that I answered any

questions in the process, but I’m pretty sure that I asked some very

useful ones, and they were certainly questions that I needed to look

at for myself. So the act of inquiry became a worthwhile journey

regardless of the ultimate destination.

When I was done, I knew I had written something very

unlike any other science fiction book I’d ever read. I had either

written a very good book or a very embarrassing book.1 With a

great deal of fear and trembling, I sent the manuscript off to Betty

Ballantine. She decided it was a very good book and published

When HARLIE Was One in 1972.

It was my first novel, even though it wasn’t the first one

1 Eventually, I learned to recognize that feeling as a

good one. I had it again with The Man Who Folded

Himself and The Martian Child, two other books

that turned out very well.

published. It received some very nice reviews and went on to be

nominated for both the Hugo and the Nebula awards—the first

time a first novel was ever so honored. (Isaac Asimov eventually

won both awards for The Gods Themselves.) But the best

compliment was from Robert Silverberg, who had two excellent

novels of his own on the ballot. He asked me to warn him the next

time I was planning to write a book that good, so he wouldn’t have

to compete.

When HARLIE Was One is also the novel that

introduced the concept of the computer virus to popular thought.

For that I am profoundly sorry.

I first heard the idea of a computer program called a

VIRUS (and the corresponding VACCINE software) in the late

summer of 1968. A programmer shared it as a joke. I thought it

was a funny and fascinating notion and incorporated it into the

next HARLIE story, even postulating that it could be used as a

means for extracting data illegally and moving it around to other

machines. It made for an interesting plot device.

When I wrote that bit, I thought it was merely

speculation about what computers might someday be able to do. I

had no idea that all sorts of malware variants, worms and trojans

and virii would someday become a global epidemic, let alone a

whole industry of malicious criminal schemes. To this day, I still

do not understand why anyone would write malicious software,

especially when there are so many more interesting and exciting

things to do with a computer.

A couple of other notes about this edition.

Back when this book was written, computers weren’t

just quaint, they were primitive. Most of the interaction was on

teletype-like printers or occasionally an alphanumeric terminal.

There were no graphics. Everything was text and numbers. And

most of it was all caps—not because we were all shouting at each

other, but because it was easier to write code that way in a world

where every byte was expensive.

I didn’t even see my first computer until a year after

When HARLIE Was One was published. (It was a DEC 10 and it

looked like a refrigerator full of wires.) So my experience of the

state of the art at the time I wrote this book was an IBM Selectric

typewriter.2 (Look it up.) It had an infuriated golf ball that clattered

back and forth across the page. The keyboard had a satisfyingly

tactile clickety-click feeling that no subsequent keyboard has ever

matched. That machine was as solid and dependable as you could

imagine. It was my first technological love affair.

Typing on that Selectric, it was easy to imagine that I

2 You can see Malcolm McDowell pushing one off a

table in Stanley Kubrick’s movie of A Clockwork Orange.

was having a conversation with a dispassionate intelligence engine

embodied somewhere in its metal chassis. The back-and-forth of

the Selectric type ball paralleled the back and forth of ideas and

insights.

All the conversations with HARLIE were written in

capitals because it was the way computer conversations showed up

on printouts. It was the convention of the time. Today it looks

quaint, ugly, and almost unreadable, but I have resisted the

temptation to reformat the text because if I allow myself that first

change, pretty soon I’ll be rewriting the whole thing all over again.

Nope, not gonna do it.

The only change I did allow myself, and only fanatic

readers would have noticed it, is the spelling of one character’s

name. Handley has been changed to Hanley to honor my friends

John Hanley Sr. and John Hanley Jr.

Meanwhile. . . .

HARLIE’s still with me today. Sort of.

I’ve been off my own journeys for a while, studying

what I call the technologies of consciousness, so I don’t need him

at the keyboard anymore, but the question I typed so many years

ago is still rattling around in my head.

As of this writing, this is how it looks to me. If I were

still using HARLIE’s voice, this is what he would say:

The function of life is to make more life.

To accomplish that, life creates consciousness.

The purpose of consciousness is to make more

consciousness.

To accomplish that, consciousness creates

contribution. Contribution is about making a

difference for others.

The function of contribution is to make more

contribution so that consciousness can expand and life

can spread into new domains.

Sentience is a product of contribution. It is not just

self-awareness, but awareness of the selves of others

as well. It is created in partnership and demonstrated

in combined efforts that are greater than all the

individual selves.

As for me, in this long, long journey from adolescence

to senility, with occasional stops at what passes for maturity (but is

more often sheer exhaustion), I remain enormously indebted to

large numbers of people, starting with those who resisted the

temptation to strangle me in my crib, all the way up to those who

put up with me as I struggled with my involuntary humanity, and

concluding with those who believed I was worth the effort to coach

and encourage.

You guys know who you are. Thanks for the adventure!

—David Gerrold